Of mice, men, and tap-dancing chihuahuas

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

The dudes in the Ministry of Fear, alias the Prime Minister’s Office, have struck again.

Kootenay-Columbia Conservative MP David Wilks has been taken to the woodshed of Stephen Harper’s political re-education camp. That’s the place where you go in a man and come out a tap-dancing Chihuahua.

Is there a sadder spectacle in public life than a backbench MP who was almost courageous? Bad enough when you are only brave in private, and then only if you can find 12 plucky colleagues to back you up. But when you climb down all the way to the supine position after your “real” thoughts about government policy are Youtubed, it’s probably time to pack in politics and open a tanning salon. Even in these dear, dirty times, David, no one likes dancing to the rhythm of a grown man’s knees knocking.

The reality in the Harper government is that the backbench is full of bobble-headed nobodies who have for the most part embraced their role with zeal; doing what they’re told and otherwise keeping the pie-hole firmly shut. Like everybody else, David Wilks knows that Bill C-38 is not about its Ozzie and Harriett moniker – Jobs, Growth, and Long Term Prosperity. With 70 pieces of legislation folded into this bogus budget implementation bill, it is nothing but a kick in the parliamentary meat-pies of every Opposition MP in the House of Commons. It is brass knuckles and blackjack democracy. In other words, it is not democracy at all.

David Wilks is not the first and won’t be the last MP to learn that only Dear Leader is allowed to exercise his cerebral synapses. Harper famously tried to intimidate long-time Conservative MP Bill Casey when Casey told the PM that he couldn’t vote for the government budget of the day because it violated the terms of the Atlantic Accord. (It did, and distressed finance officials privately said so.) Harper had Casey sweated like a murder suspect in a smoky backroom. An array of cabinet ministers including Peter MacKay and Gary Lunn tried to cajole and then browbeat him into voting for a budget that he believed cheated Atlantic Canada. The only thing missing was a naked light bulb swinging back and forth on a dangling cord. Everyone slammed the door on the way in and the way out, including finance minister Jim Flaherty.

When Casey held fast and voted against the budget, he was tossed out of caucus like a box of Kentucky Fried chicken bones from a speeding car. He was vindicated, though, handily winning his Nova Scotia seat as an Independent against the Harper candidate before retiring from politics. But to this day, he has never told the full story of his ordeal because of fear of reprisals. If he ever does, the mayor of a certain Maritime town will have an interesting story to tell about just how far Harper revenge tactics can go against anyone who crosses him.

Like George W. Bush, Harper recognizes only one virtue in his followers – following. It actually means joining the zombie squad and voting on demand. If you don’t, your political career in the stratosphere of the Conservative party is over. If you do, you get to drink $16-a-glass orange juice. It was too much for Michael Chong, Harper’s one-time minister of intergovernmental affairs, who decided it was better to simply represent the interests of his constituents in Wellington-Halton Hills rather than stay in cabinet and support Harper’s motion making the Quebecois a “nation”.

Chong’s replacement at the time, Peter Van Loan, absorbed the political lesson: the route to the executive bathroom is blind allegiance to the boss. Tories have been bumping into each other ever since trying to find the golden door knob.

But the luminaries of the party who have ridden slavish obedience to success, people like John Baird and Tony Clement, have been diminished by Stephen Harper’s one-man rule. Baird has become the unabashed ambassador of Canada’s international decline; Tony, the laughable champion of transparency in government, hiding behind guff and gazebos. It’s getting to be a case of “Honey, I shrank my cabinet ministers.” The expedient defer to Dear Leader at their peril.

The feckless Peter MacKay has gone from being a future leadership contender in the Conservative party to a man whose political capital can now be counted in glass beads. How long can it be before he becomes just another high-priced political escort for some Bay Street law firm out to display its Ottawa connections? Helicopter rides and F-35 whoppers have wiped out MacKay’s national reputation. But his latest mission, defending the Harper vision that everyone on the east coast should live in Fort McMurray, could finish the job with the folks back home.

Unlike Bill Casey, who stood up for his region under pressure, MacKay went back to Nova Scotia to shill for an unjust EI policy that has been panned by all four Atlantic Canadian premiers. All of them say Ottawa is targeting seasonal workers, including 20,000 in MacKay’s own province. Still, he parrots the party line. And who came up with the policy? A guy who once memorably described Atlantic Canada as a “culture of failure,” the Right Honorable you-know-who.

Now MacKay is selling the sequel to Dear Leader’s conclusion about the Maritime malaise. Repeat EI offenders must commute to jobs deemed suitable by Ottawa, even though they live in a region where Boston boasts the closest subway. Better yet, they might consider packing West to partake of the culture of success. And if they don’t like Ottawa’s decisions about their EI destinies, they can tell it to their dog. Mr. Harper has handily done away with the EI appeal process, just as he has deep-sixed the Law Reform Commission, the Canadian Wheat Board, the Gun Registry, and any vestige of environmental protection except the kind promoted by those well-known planetary benefactors, the Koch Brothers of Wichita Kansas.

You know, the American billionaires who believe virtue is as important as talent (their web site actually says that), even though that hasn’t stopped them from financing any climate change denier who can quack, or according to Bloomberg News, making illicit payments to win contracts. The same Koch Brothers forked over half a million to the Fraser Institute for undisclosed international work, which may or may not have anything to do with protecting Koch Industries’ 50-year position in the Alberta tarsands/oilsands.

Senator Nicole Eaton’s nerves must be doing the frug. One can only hope that the think-tank that believes God made trees for chainsaws is not turning radical under the influence of foreign money. As for the good Senator, whose grasp of science is a little like the Vatican’s in Galileo’s day, the PM’s science advisor might have forewarned her that the Prairies are flat, the Earth is not. Sadly, the PM has done away with the position of science advisor.

Despite the boa-constrictor the PM has put on inside information leaking out from the government, a few whispers have escaped. A member or two of the inner circle are getting uneasy with Bill C-38, noting with a worm of fear in the guts that the NDP has overtaken the Harper Party in the polls. The message they are getting is not to think of C-38 as a budget implementation bill at all, but as a bold legislative move that will change everything. So just disregard the polls and soldier on. There is only one exception to the ignore-the-polls directive; polls about the government being on the right track on the economy.

Yes, Stephen Harper is betting the farm on a proposition he takes to be self-evident – that Canadians will forgive and forget everything as long as the economy is hitting on all cylinders. Corporations are the heroes of Harper’s set economic argument, Canadians their grateful peons. He has said that government must get out of the way of corporations so that they can work their magic with investment and development. That’s why he has gutted the environmental review process. That’s why he insists on corporate tax cuts while cutting the social services of Canadians. That’s why he will now allow foreign takeovers of Canadian companies without review, if the value of the asset is a billion dollars or less, roughly triple the former trigger point.

But will the public buy the notion the PM is trying to sell – that what’s good for the corporate world and the Alberta oil patch is good for them? With poster boys like Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Koslowski, the Rigas Family, Jeffrey Skilling, and Raj Rajaratnam, what has the corporate elite done over the last decade but lie, cheat and steal its way into the public consciousness as a scourge on society?

How salutary is corporate investment when Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Securities, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, and Morgan Keegan have all had to pay hundreds of millions in fines for dishonest business dealings in the past two years? Even Conrad Black had to eat macaroni for a few years for playing fast and loose with other peoples’ money.

How fair is it that when corporate greed took the economy off the rails after years of privatizing obscene profits, the unimaginable losses were socialized? And why should Canadians drop all their environmental concerns about the tarsands/oilsands when the project is 71 percent owned by foreign investors? Is this the best we can do: arrange to send the profits from this dubious enterprise out of the country faster than the prime minister can furnish defeated Tory candidates with government jobs?

Stephen Harper and his ministers have routinely fiddled the facts, broken the rules, and treated a lot of Canadians with contempt in their headlong rush to re-make the country without the inconvenience of persuading people that theirs is the right path to follow. In a way, they have become a little like the masters of the universe at Enron, who thought they could sell the world fake profits and hidden debts by controlling all of the information. When a jury convicted Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in one of the worst fraud cases in U.S. history, this is how prosecutor Sean Berkowitz summed up what was behind the verdict: “You can’t lie to shareholders. No matter how rich and powerful, you must play by the rules.”

Betting that you can lie to the 99 percent and not play by the rules in government is not a sure thing, no matter what the GDP numbers say for the 1 percent.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.